During last year's December sale, we included a small freebie game for folks who ordered at least two games. Said small freebie game, Christmas at White Mountain, was pretty well-received (better than most small freebie games, I think), and led eventually to the design and release of Table Battles, which has proven to be very popular. So of course we were going to do another small freebie game for this year's December sale. And, just like last year, I had no idea what I was going to do. Working on the assumption that Table Battles was going to be successful...

ears ago, when I had delusions of being a euro-game designer, I designed a game about monks in the dark ages copying the masterworks of antiquity. There was something like nine different actions a player could take, which were all somewhat related to one another. The crux of the game is that each player started with an identical set of action tiles, which they added to as they bought and placed new tiles, increasing the actions that were available to them (and, eventually, to other players). And so the rules for the game began by explaining the components and the...

We went to Origins last Friday. It was a somewhat impromptu thing. If you've been following us on Facebook or our podcast, you know that our convention plans for this year were limited to attending CSW Expo in Tempe, and that our plans were derailed by another installment in Tom's Lower Back Strikes Back (c'mon, Hollywood, enough with the sequels and reboots already!). With our convention budget being freed up, we decided we'd go to Origins for a day trip - much less ambitious than driving a couple of thousand miles from Detroit to Tempe! - and felt Friday sounded...

As I've mentioned more than once, Mary is amazing. One of the reasons why she's amazing is that she stops me from doing dumb things. Don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure she once had to legitimately stop me from putting aluminum foil in the microwave, and also from wearing Velcro shoes to a professional interview. Recently I thought it was a smart idea to put fennel in twice-baked potatoes, and learned that it wasn't such a smart idea after all when we were eating said potatoes, and also two, three, and four hours later during repeated visits...

Last time I talked about the goals we had in mind for our third game in the Shields & Swords II series, as well as the design of the Peipus scenario. This time, I'm going to talk about the second half of the game: the Battle of Karuse. The times as they were in 1260, ten years prior to the Battle of Karuse. Karuse is much more obscure than Peipus. Peipus is, after all, the victory that made Alexander Nevsky a Saint in the Orthodox Church, and the battle that was immortalized by Eisenstein's rousing 1938 film, and Prokofiev's score...